


Running Toward

by DestielsDestiny



Series: Running, Healing [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Future Fic, Gen, Healing, Lightsabers are beautiful, M/M, Muteness, Post-Canon, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Swimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 14:58:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7366477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is an opposite of running away. This is not that.</p><p>Or, the one where defeating the Heads of two galactic Empires might be the easiest thing Luke has ever had to do, the galaxy far, far away has no mental health facilities, but fortunately Luke has a remote island, and Poe has the most beautiful smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Toward

**Author's Note:**

> AN: I own nothing.

Luke’s mornings are simple these days. Not the way they were when he was a boy, when the day started with the sunrises and consisted of a regimented list of endless back breaking labour that never changed, as static as the seasons or gusts of sand. 

Not the way they were in the Rebel Alliance, where frenetic activity was broken by long stretches so boring and monotonous that polishing their X-wings actually became something the pilots bet each other on. 

Not the way they were in the years after that, when meditation was a chorus of young and old voices, inexperienced and joyous and hopeful. 

Not the way they were in the silence that followed long after even that, the windswept crashes of water on rock serving no purpose except to amplify the cloying ache deep in Luke’s chest, the ache where something should have been roaring louder than the waves, but where that something was now sleeping deeper than the stones themselves. 

Not the way they were in those endless years when even the Force proved it could get tired. 

Not the way they were with the Resistance, meetings followed by training followed by flirting followed by missions followed by more flirting, little time for sleep and even less time for anything remotely close to simple. 

The only thing simple in those days was the flirting, as fresh and clean and wild as the eyes that danced behind every gawdy pick-up line and cringing flirtation. Every wink and cocked eyebrow, brush of a shoulder and barrel roll of a ship hull. 

Force, Luke misses that smile. 

These days, mornings still consist of rather a lot of meditation, and rather a lot of crashing waves and profound silence. These days, mornings are something Luke wishes would never come, because each other reminds of how very tired he is, how very old he feels, for all that he’s still a good deal younger than Old Ben was when Vader killed him. For all that the Force now thrums a steady beat around Luke’s heart, billowing into the air like sea spray, dancing and colourful and happy, in a way that Luke has never seen before, that Old Ben never saw again, when he was alive. 

These days, mornings are simple. They consist of meditation, the sea, and quietly watching the man he has grown to love despite his very best intentions slowly die a little more inside, with every passing day. 

These days, mornings are something that never seem to end. 

\--  
It took Luke and Rey a day to end the War, in the end. An hour to try to save Ben, only to watch him finally follow in the footsteps of Anakin Skywalker, for the first and only time in his life.

It took a good twelve hours to defeat what was left of Hux’s machinations, and if Luke’s hand slips just enough to reduce the aforementioned General to several smaller pieces of the former aforementioned General, nobody says anything about it. 

If Leia’s hug is just a touch clingy, and just a little wet, nobody says anything about that either. 

It’s the first time Luke’s been hugged by his sister since Ben left all those years ago. It feels strangely like something that may one day be the start of forgiveness. 

It takes them six more months to find Poe.  
That, Luke never quite forgives himself for. 

\--  
Poe likes to swim. Luke doesn’t remember if the laughing little boy he once met in Shara Bey’s backyard had cared even a little about getting wet, but then, there hadn’t been much in the way of swimming size bodies of suitable water on Yavin. 

One could argue the same was differently but equably true of the gale torn oceans surrounding one of Atch-To’s few habitable land masses, but that never bothered Luke. 

Nor does it bother Poe evidently.

Luke nearly has a heart attack the first time he wakes in their rather cozy cave, if Rey had said so herself, complete with Chewie’s latest attempts at knit throw rugs, to find the bed of rugs beside his left elbow entirely devoid of slightly dazed, completely mute Resistance Pilot. 

His heart is still attempting to beat completely out of his chest the moment he rounds yet another jagged outcropping of razor sharp rocks to the sounds of splashing, of all things. Luke isn’t entirely sure how he tells the difference over the crash of the waves hitting the rocks, spray reaching past his shoulder, despite the fact he’s at least twenty meters above the ocean’s surface, on what is for Atch-To, a relatively calm, balmy day. 

Still, ears deceiving him in his old age or not, there is indeed a small figure tossing it’s dark, curly head happily about in the water like a seal, BB-8 attempting to remain hooked to the rock ledge above the figure’s tossing form while not being completely swept out to sea. The droid looks like nothing more than a scalded orange cat to be honest. 

Luke silently thanks whatever part of the Force still listens to him on a bad day, and leaps without hesitation into the surf, seventy odd feet below. The Force must have been listening, because he successfully avoids both braining Poe with his boots, and braining himself with the surrounding rocks. 

He still gets a lung full of sea foam however, cold and tangy and shocking enough that it takes a moment to register the limpet presence pressed against his back, tentacle like arms snaking around his soaked shoulders. 

Poe is more wet than Luke could possibly have imagined, every inch of him dripping everywhere, even while hanging onto the back of a Jedi that just remember he never really got the hang of treading water in the first place. He’s also completely silent, the same as he’s been for the past eleven months.

Amazingly, his breath on Luke’s neck feels slightly warm, despite the frigid temperatures they are currently submerged in. 

Luke’s kicking fails them for a moment under the combined weight of their clothes, and their heads re-emerge in the same sputtering instant. They are turned around enough that Luke comes out of the sputtering pile of limbs clutching Poe to his front, rather than the other way around. Which is how his eyes finally take in the grin plastered on Poe’s features, his smile as carefree and open as it was as a boy. 

Luke hasn’t seen Poe look anything other than blank or pained since the day he opened Hux’s private cell block on a ridiculously remote moon expecting to find a skeleton waiting for him, and found a barely breathing, bloody heap of rags instead. 

Force, Luke has missed that smile.

Luke is a desert creature at heart, for all that he hasn’t laid eyes on so much as a single grain of sand in nearly twenty years that he can recall, but he still follows Poe out of their cave every morning after that, wraps his arms around the rock steady shoulders of the still silent but somehow content pilot, and lets them both fall off the cliff. 

The Force always catches them before they drown, without fail. 

And Poe always smiles wider than the suns of Tatooine. Every time. Without fail.

00

Taking Poe with him back to Atch-To wasn’t much of an event. In fact, it was rather more of a non-event. 

The argument about what should happen to the Jedi order after the First Order’s defeat never came, thanks in no small part to Luke’s decade long recruitment drive and temple fact finding mission, which turned up a surprising number of surviving Jedi, from the first massacre, and budding Force Users from after the second. 

Defeating Snoke is a better Trial for Rey than anything Luke could have ever dreamed up anyway. The hard part had been persuading her and Finn to go use their talent to help others, rather than trek around the galaxy after a washed out old Jedi, attempting to find a ghost that is probably long dead. 

By the time half a year has elapsed, Luke has faded back into legend to all but a few. 

Bringing Poe’s emaciated half-corpse back to his sister might have upset that status quo, if Leia had chosen to tell anyone that Poe was even alive. 

It takes three days of watching his sister weep over Poe’s blank expression and even blanker force signature for Luke to gather the light body back up in his cloak’s folds and disappear into the night as quietly as he’d come. 

A week later, a familiar ship containing one Wookie and two droids deposits said droids on Luke’s little slice of peace, hugs him for a rather long time, and then flies away, minus the droids.

Leia sent no message, but Luke knows she understands all the same. 

00

Dinner is an arduous affair at the best of times on Atch-To. The best being when the wind was relatively moderate, the spray didn’t quite reach high enough to wet the entrance of the small cavern Luke has called home for the better part of a decade, and the miniature heater he’s coaxed back to life countless times over those long years consents to sputter up to a reasonable degree of luke warm. 

All of which means that hot food is somewhat more than a rarity in their windswept existence. Luke only wishes that was the reason why dinner was such an ordeal for both of them. And not the fact that Poe, placid and silent and eerily docile ninety-five percent of the time, turns into a rabid animal when Luke so much as places food remotely near him. 

Luke knows every particular of the reasons why, relives it frequently enough in his nights that he almost believes he was there when it happened, for real. Neither of which helps one iota in figuring out how to help Poe ingest even a morsel of nourishment without nearly having a panic induced seizure. 

Their solution, apart from the daily nutrient injections that Poe is bizarrely, disturbingly compliant for, was more Poe’s idea than Luke’s. 

It involved rather more manhandling and rather less coaxing then Luke ever feels he should condone, but Poe occasionally gets enough solid food down his throat to prevent his ribs from quite poking through his shirt, so Luke is willing to go along with what he must. 

It doesn’t stop him from crying tears of relief, intermingled with the tears of joy, the first time Poe hesitantly snatches a square of utterly unappetizing, mostly cold fish off Luke’s plate, and actually, torturously slowly, brings it too his own lips.  
The wet, slippery, crunching sound Poe’s teeth make on the shell of the fish is the most beautiful sound Luke’s heard in a long, long time. 

00

Sleeping is a much more enjoyable activity than eating in this new life of theirs, which is mostly down to the running. 

Luke had only been back on the island for three days when he woke to find Poe gone from their cavern. He’d spent rather longer than he likes to admit panicking, before he remembered that delightful thing called force sensitivity. 

After than, catching Poe proved far harder than finding him. For someone who was a good forty pounds underweight and just up from a debilitating fever than probably should have killed him, Poe was a surprisingly fast runner. 

Luke sits quietly on a rock outcropping at the edge of the cave mouth, watching Poe run tireless circles around the stair like rock peaks along the water’s edge, waiting as patiently as he can. 

He ends up throwing his cloak over Poe in the closest to an ambush he can manage on wet rocks, and spends the next hour hugging a struggling pilot into sleep beside a crackling portable heater. 

Poe is up and running again the next morning. 

It takes a week before Luke sighs once, stands up from his rocky perch, discards his cloak behind him, and joins in. 

They both sleep much sounder after that. 

00

Lightsabers don’t strictly require polishing, as far as Luke has ever been able to determine. Obi-Wan had had far more important things on his mind to impart to Luke in the less than two days they knew each than the proper care and maintenance of laser swords. 

The swamp aspects of Yoda’s home rather rendered such things moot anyway. Or at least it never came up. 

Luke has always found a certain comfort in the process however, disassembling every component of the hilt, lovingly brushing force sensitized fingers over the sparkling crystal. 

He’s had few opportunities in his life that are peaceful enough to risk disassembling his entire saber long enough to complete the process, but every time he does, it still feels just as good. Just as right. Just as safe. 

A universe without the First Order provides a surprising number of opportunities to experience that feeling. 

Luke cleans his saber every day, right down to the crystal. He’s just as incredulous it lasts the hundredth time he does it as he was the first. 

Poe takes to watching Luke in the months after their arrival, sitting a good foot away from Luke’s cross legged form, their bodies taking up the entire shelf of rock Luke has to leap them both to, so high off the ground is it. 

Poe gets incrementally closer as the days wear on into weeks, just as his hours of pacing outside alone get fewer, and his moments of following Luke around grow into stretches of unbroken hours. 

Luke supposes he shouldn’t really be surprised the day he looks up from disassembling the last of the inner housing to find a slightly shaky hand holding out a turquoise blue crystal, scared fingers stroking the edge of the smooth contours with a reverent grace. 

Luke’s fingers brush Poe’s just slightly in the hand off, and for a moment, Luke could swear Poe looks content. 

00

Luke feels his eyes slowly come into focus on the still face of his sleeping companion, lets his gaze sweep the heady vision of Poe whole and safe and almost well. Alive. 

He opens his shields as he does every morning, feeling the answering pulse of Poe’s bright signature. 

Luke allows himself a moment to brush the wavy hair off Poe’s forehead, before rising to start another morning, all over again. 

00

Luke doesn’t fly the X-Wing he more or less stole to get them both to their remote island home. He keeps the black and red shell carefully covered from the wind and sea spray, because he knows Poe would kill him if he didn’t. Would have killed him. 

Sometimes he sits in the cockpit for hours, staring at nothing in particular. Sometimes Poe sits on a rock nearby, watching nothing in particular, waiting until he’s ready to go. Poe never so much as looks at the ship. 

00

Luke wakes up on his thousandth odd day back on his island hideout to the smell of slightly burnt fish permeating the air.  
He jerks up from their bedroll so fast, his lightsaber is humming in the small space before he even registers Poe isn’t sleeping beside him. 

Warm brown eyes regard Luke dispassionately from across the cooking fire. BB whistles happily, for once not needing binary to basic coding to express zer joy. 

Poe’s eyes look strange amidst blue of Luke’s loosely held blade turning everything a jumbled haze of blue and red and white in the pre-dawn light. They look almost...alive. 

“Morning Luke. I thought the fish might taste better hot.” Poe's voice is rough, cracked, arid, but one look at the mischievous grin flickering across his face, and you would think Poe had just strolled in from a mission, not been entirely silent for the better part of four years. 

Luke doesn’t stop laughing for a long, long time. It is a wonderful change from crying. Particularly when Poe joins in, laughing until their bodies shake and the tin plates rattle. 

These days, mornings are his favourite time of the day.


End file.
